None of this makes any sense

Unfortunately, many business people think that everything has to be just like that other really exciting and sexy thing in order to survive. However, this just isn’t true. This chase-your-competitor mentality only leads companies to veer away from their true brand and into the territory of a prostitute, selling whatever feature they think is sexiest at the time. Even if your competitors aren’t sexy, making yourself sexier isn’t necessarily the best move - especially if being sexy is against H.R. policy.

Jim Edwards at Business Insider wrote a short article decrying the boring and unsexy appeal of LinkedIn. If you’d like to go read it first, I’ll wait.

Edwards believes that even though LinkedIn seems to have a strong business model, it seems to be less volatile than it’s social media peers and that it consistently creates products relevant to its core offering, it just doesn’t have that short skirt and heels that everyone on the Internet loves.

Social media need to have sex appeal in order to cement their brands in the minds of consumers.

Ohhh, so only the sexy brands are the ones that last for ever? I’m sorry, Edwards, but you’re off the mark here.

The sexy brands are the ones that actually get so easily replaced by another sexy brand. The brands that get cemented into the mind of consumers have connected with consumers at a deep emotional level. Sexy is the mistress who is volatile, crazy and can get you into deep water. Your wife is the one who means a lot more to you. And don’t get me wrong, we all love it when our wives our sexy. But every spouse out there would be lying if they said their significant other was sexy in EVERY WAY. Heaven knows my sweat pants from college are not my wife’s turn-on, yet she’s with me still. Mowing the lawn is not sexy either but you know what, sometimes it works for her.

So being sexy is the last of LinkedIn’s problems. LinkedIn is a site for professional use. It’s not social media the way social media was originally defined - an online orgy of thought, fame and photo-tagging. In the world of social media, LinkedIn is where your Facebook profile goes to work. And if you show up drunk at work with your Go-Go boots, you may run into some problems. The same goes for LinkedIn. Don’t become what you’re not. Otherwise, you might get written up by H.R. and abandoned by everyone who knows the role you play in their life.

There is a shift in thought among business persons that they can create consumers from thin air. That the right message, product, or tactic will act like a magic spell and completely shift the loyalties, desires and behaviors of an individual in a flash. It seems in today’s society, products have suddenly come to think they are gods breathing life into men instead of simply an apple hanging from the tree.

Along with the concept of desacralizing, Maslow introduced the notion of the Jonah complex. In this syndrome, a person, like the prophet Jonah in the Bible, avoids the deeper pursuits of which he or she is capable. It is a pattern of running away from one’s calling. Such a person prefers to stay on the surface of life, and he or she pays a huge price in the sense of subsequent meaninglessness, unfulfillment, and guilt.

Maslow has suggested that one characteristic of the self-actualizing personality is the ability to resacralize people and things, to bring the sense of the sacred back into experience. The self-actualizing person has learned to be awe-inspired, to marvel at the beauty, mystery and infinite complexity of life, to include an appreciation of the cosmic and the spiritual as well as the material.

This is from the textbook “Beneath the Mask” by Christopher F. Monte and Robert N. Sollod.

So, I saw this being reposted Facebook. I’ve edited it a bit to make it feel like less of a chain letter (it used to ask you to pass it on to 20 people, etc etc) but there’s an interesting idea here.

In an interview on CNBC, Warren Buffett says, ”I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

The Facebook post then went on to describe other laws that came to be rather quickly:

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971…before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.

It then offered this plan, which is not Buffett’s (I assume - as the CNBC article does not mention any of the below) but it’s interesting. It’s as follows:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011 

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term’s, then go home and back to work.

It’s intereting in that it completely re-works the incentives for congresspersons. To me, it feels like a pretty smart move in order to protect the people and improve our government. It might also inspire more people to run for government since it will feel less like an old boy’s club. I might also add that no government official should receive compensation of any kind from any corporation - and all incentives during and after their tenure for up to 10 years should be audited to guarantee it (or some other way of guaranteeing it). Also, I’d probably adopt something like this for all of government - not just congress.

The CNBC article than had an update:

UPDATE:  An attorney in St. Louis, Jarrad Holst, points out by email that there is a way to enact Buffett’s idea without the cooperation of Congress.  Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, a “Convention for proposing Amendments” is convened when called for by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states.  A proposed amendment would then need to be ratified by the legislatures of three-quarters of the states.  If that happens, and it is a very, very big if, Buffett’s deficit plan would become the law of the land.  That process would, however, take more than five minutes.

Obviously there’s more to be done but it seems really intriguing. I also wonder if the Occupy Wall Street movement could be energized to make something like the above happen? Or another movement altogether?

What are your thoughts?